15 Oct 2008

In a society where we are exposed to a wide range of Information Technology and which has changed a lot in recent years, NTIC are really important to ‘revolutionize’ teaching methods and didactic contents in foreign language teaching. Thirty years ago the main aim was that students could learn grammatical points but nowadays the aim has changed and, communicative competence is considered more relevant. NTIC are not a method in itself but a mean that helps to create the methods and pedagogical approaches which can be applied. Only those who are able to bring technology to the pedagogical field, will find new ways to enrich their educational programs and increase their students learning opportunities.

AUTHORING TOOLS let teachers to create new worksheets in an easy way, without programming knowledge such as. Some of them are free but other ones are not:

- WIDA It’s not free, although you can download a demo. You can create a great variety of exercises for your students with it (gap-filling exercises, multi-choice questions, matching pairs exercises, text reconstruction ones, etc).

- HOT POTATOES allows to create short answers exercises, crosswords, matching exercises…) You can downloaded from here. It is FREE although all the documents you create with it, are of public domain. Once you have created your own materials you can export them to your website through a link…

- MAXAUTHOR is a program which was designed by Arizona University to create dictation, pronunciation, multiple-choice activities… It is FREE and you can downloaded from here.

- TASKMAGIC is used a lot in UK to create an amount of different exercises online. You can see more information here. It is not free but you can download a TRIAL VERSION.

- VOKABEL has got vocabulary exercises in different languages and allows you to create your own test. It is FREE.

- GAPKIT 2.0 is a program for creating multimedia gap-filling and multi-choice exercises with pictures and sound. It is not free but it’s quite cheap, 35 pounds. Besides, if you want to check it you can download a trial version.

- SPELLMASTER is a program to create your own Flash vocabulary. It is FREE.

TaskMagic, listed in your list, is probably the most used commercial authoring tool among UK language teachers. The link you have included above is to the Australian site. The appropriate link for the UK, Europe etc is http://www.taskmagic.co.uk or http://www.mdlsoft.co.uk